HTML Coding
Implementing Image Maps
By Laura Lemay
Maps, in the real world, are a visual representation of some kind of space: metropolitan Boston, the way to get from US 101 South to a friend's house for a party, the third floor of the mall. The map will hopefully give you some sense of where you are and how to get where you're going—they're a navigational tool. Image maps on the Web serve a similar purpose, in a slightly different respect; they are a navigational tool for actually taking you from your current location (the Web page) to somewhere else on the Web.
If you've explored the Web at all, you've seen image maps; they're used for button bars and navigational menus, visual metaphors such as houses or desktops, or even Web-based representations of real geographical maps. In any of these instances, the image map is a collection of links behind a single image. Where you go on the Web depends on where inside the image you've clicked. Image maps can be an extremely powerful mechanism for organizing a site and for allowing your readers to navigate easily throughout that site.
Most graphical browsers support image maps (I don't know of any browser that doesn't). However, there are two very different ways of implementing image maps in your own Web presentations, and not all browsers support both. Those two different types are server-side and client-side image maps; the former is more "standard," and is supported by more browsers; the latter more technically elegant, easier to administer, and part of the new HTML 3.2 standard—but not as widely supported amongst different browsers.
